EDIT: generated in MATLAB using manual bit shifting. DSP or assembler would have been far more efficient, but I believe the MATLAB result is correct.

Don't want to be harsh but what purpose of such extraction? Point me if I am wrong but separated less significant bits (17-24) don't mimic the original signal and contain pure quantization differences/errors (noise).

P.S. I don't know if it's placebo but I hear some background intelligible sounds

Don't want to be harsh but what purpose of such extraction? Point me if I am wrong but separated less significant bits (17-24) don't mimic the original signal and contain pure quantization differences/errors (noise).

P.S. I don't know if it's placebo but I hear some background intelligible sounds

Whatever should be in those LSBs, it clearly shouldn't be white noise.

P.S. If you listen to white noise for long enough, you'll eventually hear the sound of monkeys typing out the works of Shakespeare...

Whatever should be in those LSBs, it clearly shouldn't be white noise.

Not white, but quantization noise.

*Stupid* Example:

Imagine you've done 3 measurements with 24-bit tool of length measurement. 10.3/12.2/13.1 cm . As you can see it's increasing functionAfter that you've done exactly the same 3 measurements but now with 16 bit tool 10/12/13 cm. It's still the same function with the same characteristics but less precise.

So, I'm not saying that LSBs (17-24) are useless and don't contain useful data but I think (and might be wrong) that _without_ MSBs those bits have nothing in common with original signal.

Take this example: a 1500Hz sine wave is rendered at 48k in bits 1-8 of a 16 bit signal; bits 9-16 are set to white noise. A spectrogram of bits 9-16 obviously has no features at this point. The 16-bit signal is then multiplied linearly by 0.5. There is now some information relating to the sine wave in bit 9 and the spectrogram of bits 9-16 looks like this:

i.e. not white noise and showing the presence of frequencies that do relate to the original function (they are multiples thereof).

Whatever should be in those LSBs, it clearly shouldn't be white noise.

?

When you quantise a signal where the entire signal spectrum is well above the quantisation level, the difference between the original and quantised version (i.e. the quantisation noise) is white noise.

It obviously has something to do with the original signal (it's the last 8 bits of it in this case), but whether it is any way correlated or even meaningfully related to the original signal is another question.